Shane McGlaun16 September 2009, 7:00 AM
Tiny Pico-ITX mainboard has HDMI and 1080p video yet measures only 10 cm x 7.2 cm.
VIA has been getting its hardware inside an increasing number of computer systems over the last few months including landing inside some
nettops from Shuttle that I talked about before. VIA has announced its latest offering today called the VIA
EPIA-P720 Pico-ITX board that is tiny and packs in some serious performance.
The little pico-ITX mainboard measures only 10cm x 7.2cm and runs a fanless VIA Eden ULV CPU. The board supports up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM and features an integrated VIA VX855 media system processor. That media system processor means that PCs based on the new board will be able to accelerate 1080p HD video in several popular formats.
Supported video codecs include H.264, VC1, WMV9, and MPEG 2/4. The system also has output options including VGA and HDMI. The VX855 chipset itself can also accelerate graphics with support for DirectX 9 and it has a 128-bit 2D engine with hardware rotation capability. The board also has two USB ports and one SATA port built-in.